dropping him down to his knees
by Ivory Muse
Summary: Let him go, he gave up. / Tim languishes, Sylvia drowns, and Angela picks up the pieces Dallas Winston left behind.


notes: sort of a sequel to baby, it's a violent world? also: the shepards have become my new heroin.

.i.

He never thought that fucking Dallas Winston would have a burial. It isn't that he didn't know he would die young- Dallas'd had young tragic death written all over his face since the day they met- but this peaceful little ceremony with tweeting birdies and a headstone and even a goddamn preacher, Jesus effing Christ, like Winston isn't already on the expressway straight to hell, is just so ridiculous that he half expects the man of the hour to burst out of his coffin in protest.

(Maybe part of me did want to believe that Dallas was immortal. He was a human hurricane, storming and raging and forcing the world to yield to his every whim. His death should have been impressive, gallant, even, not some desperate whimper of a suicide.

He went out robbing a grocery store, waving an empty gun.)

The sun is blazing although it's practically winter, and he fidgets with the tie he stole from his dead father's room. None of this seemed real until he went rummaging in there- it's where he keeps Dallas's clothes and weed and two hundred dollars cold cash, somewhere he doesn't have to look at them, and he didn't today. He won't tomorrow. But standing in front of that mirror, that tie a noose around his neck because nobody ever taught him how to put one on properly, it'd hit him a thousand times more than Angela bursting through the front door in the middle of the night with the news, more than getting Dallas's shit from Buck, more than the stammering invitation he got from Ponyboy Curtis to 'pay his respects.'

He doesn't do feelings. That's what makes him a greaser, he thinks, other than the switch in the back pocket of his dress pants (old habits die hard.) But he does know for damn sure that befriending Dallas was like befriending a cobra, sharp teeth and poison. One day he'd be stomping a Soc's head in for looking at you wrong, the next he'd be slashing your tires. Just kept on running and running and running until he-

(stopped.)

(he was probably the closest I've ever had to a friend.)

(fuck him backwards and sideways, because I still haven't replaced those damn tires.)

.ii.

"You're _pathetic_," Angela says, looking down at her halfway-drunk figure on the curb. Angela doesn't drink, even though she has so much more to escape. Angela doesn't run from her problems. Sylvia has wanted to punch Angela for while now, but a pleasant sort of buzz is starting to kick in and she keeps her hands to herself, partly because she'd like to keep them unbroken.

"Go 'way, then," Sylvia snaps, trying hard not to slur the words.

"Sure, I'll just let you choke on your own vomit." Angela lights a blunt and sits beside her, blowing wispy tendrils of smoke. "You could at _least_ do this shit in a bar."

Sylvia hates bars- too many questions, too many men. Pretty Sylvia, sexy Sylvia, Sylvia-who-fucks-and-drinks-until-she-can't-feel-a-damn-thing would have welcomed the attention; now she takes a deep swallow from the bottle and lets the alcohol burn through her throat. Angela laughs, and not in a nice way, either. "So your damn boyfriend died- get over yourself. Don't tell me you didn't see it coming. Our kind don't exactly have long life expectancies."

"I cheated on him," she admits, "the week before he died. With some Soc bastard who drove a Mustang, 'cause he said I had nice tits. What does that make me?" Another swallow. She's going to have one hell of hangover in the morning, but she can't bring herself to care.

(Our relationship was ephemeral, fleeting. The only person he ever loved was Johnny Cade, and I don't know if I've ever loved anyone at all. Stupid Sylvia. Sylvia-the-slut. Sylvia, still lost in a blur of weed and sex and the days when the living was easy. I was a fucktoy, but I was a damn good one.)

"So?" Angela demands. "Remember Lucy Matthews?"

Of course she remembers Lucy Matthews. Two-Bit had been pissed off to the point of trading blows, because she was barely fourteen and there were things you just didn't do with your friend's sister, and Sylvia had dragged Dally into the Curtis's laundry room and ran her nails down his back while she worked him better than that little jailbait cunt ever dreamed. Of course she remembers.

"That's different. Dally's a man."

"You cheated," Angela persists, "he cheated. Grow up, Sylvia. It's not like you don't know we get the toughest breaks."

"He took his ring this time," Sylvia whispers, and downs an enormous gulp of beer so that she doesn't cry. "I threw it at his head and he called me a bitch and he never came back. He always came back." The tears drip anyway; ugly, gasping tears that make it impossible to breathe and smear her mascara in brutal streaks.

Angela lowers herself to awkwardly pat her on the shoulder while she gets snot all over her new tights.

.iii.

Angela hates Dallas Winston. She hates pretty much everyone, but there's a special place reserved in her blueblack heart for cruel, arrogant boys with cold eyes and swift knuckles, boys like Curly who never leave jail boys like Tim who she loves at the same time boys like her parade of stepfathers who tried to make her mind them or fuck them in turn-

(He was such a _bastard_. I remember one hot day when he was slumming around my house and used a cigarette to burn a hole through the kitchen table. "What the hell did you do that for?" I'd shouted, thirteen and indignant. "Tim'll be fixin' to beat the tar out of you now."

And he'd looked at me and smirked, unafraid, with the same gaze that quelled even my hard as nails, seventeen-year-old brother. "Because I could.")

So it goes- he stole money, wouldn't put his gun down when the fuzz came, and got shot. She was the first to break the news to Tim, running home after someone told Buck Merrill told her. Word on the street is that he set the entire thing up, wanted to kill himself after his friend Johnny Cade died. She isn't sure she buys it, to be honest. Dallas jerked everyone by the hair, was charming or threatening in turn. She just can't imagine how grief would look on him- can't imagine his tears, his crumpled face, his weakness or his denial or his shaking knees.

But now she has the privilege of seeing Tim look like he's the dead man, hollow-eyed and tattered, gets to run around trying to make sure that Sylvia hasn't drunk herself into a total stupor before noon. All because the worthless asshole couldn't even die without a huge, dramatic spectacle. She should have known that he would have never been satisfied missing a prime chance to hurt.

She is a Shepard. They throw plates at each other's heads on an alarmingly regular basis, but they're nothing if not protective.

Angela _hates_ Dallas Winston.


End file.
